"DARCY, IS THAT YOU? WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?" were the first shouts he heard as he entered the corridor at Rosings.
He entered, sauntered over to his aunt, and bowed. "Good evening, Lady Catherine. Your surmise is correct, I am your nephew."
He had no idea why he was needling her, but perhaps a dozen years of pent-up frustration had something to do with it.
"Where is Fitzwilliam? What have you done? Where have you been all afternoon? Why am I having to hear disgusting rumours from SERVANTS?"
The last was punctuated with her walking stick on the marble floor.
She continued without let-up. "I have been told the most absurd rumours, that Anne, my precious Anne is dead, and WORSE! I insist this vile slander be universally contradicted! WELL! WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO SAY FOR YOURSELF?"
"Are you finished?" he asked calmly.
"FINISHED! NOT BY HALF! Answer me at once!"
"I will if you will stop carping at me," he snapped. "Good God, woman, do you never let anyone get a word in edgewise?"
He felt slightly guilty, but when he saw a mulish look on his aunt's face, and her eyes bugging out presaging a tantrum, he got over it remarkably quickly.
"Where is Fitzwilliam, and that Jezebel, Miss Bennet? What has she done to my precious Anne? How has she corrupted BOTH of my nephews?"
In what Darcy would later classify as the first time he truly and completely lost his temper in a decade, he stalked up to his aunt, took the annoying walking stick from her hands, and pounded the floor strong enough to crack the marble.
With one punch per word, he pounded out his message like an Old Testament prophet.
"ANNE… IS… DEAD… AND… YOU… KILLED… HER! Not me! Not Miss Bennet! Not the colonel! YOU! YOU ALONE ARE RESPONSIBLE."
Lady Catherine gasped in surprise, and pulled her hand to her heart in consternation, but it was easy enough to see through her ruse. Darcy was never certain she even had a heart in that chest, but she certainly never gave any of it to anyone, and she was by no means even slightly cowed.
"I WILL NOT be spoken to that way in my own home!"
Not backing down an inch, he yelled, "THIS IS NOT YOUR HOME! Anne inherited three months ago. Now that she is dead, it shall probably return to the de Bourghs. Sir Louis' will specifies who inherits, but I doubt very much it is you, unless Anne made a will of her own naming you! Did she? Succession is the most basic duty of an estate owner, and I reminded you of it every year for the last five. Teaching your daughter her duties was YOUR responsibility! Did you get it done?"
"THIS IS YOUR FAULT!" she screamed. "Had you done your duty and married, it would all be yours!"
"Why on Earth would I want this worthless pile?" he asked as nonchalantly as if they were discussing the weather or the state of the roads. "If I had married Anne, I would have sold it within the year."
In truth, he had never given much thought to who would inherit if Anne died, mostly because he did not care. He only helped his aunt because his mother demanded he do so practically on her deathbed.
He had only been nagging her to take care of the legal niceties because it was what needed to be done. He had never given that aspect any more thought than drainage, crop rotation, and care of tenant cottages. He knew Anne was nowhere near as sickly as she pretended to be. In a perfect example of the apple and tree metaphor, she only pretended illness to manipulate her mother, and had she not gone insane, she probably would have outlived all of them.
Furthermore, he strongly suspected Lady Catherine neglected the will just the same as the drainage that had left his valet looking disapprovingly at his boots either four hours earlier, or in another lifetime, depending on how he looked at it. It was either that, or she thought that somehow having the risk of losing Rosings from the family altogether might prod him to act where her pleas had not. Whether it was indolence or malic, neither explanation was to his aunt's credit.
Lady Catherine took a deep breath, and Darcy forestalled her by holding up his hand.
"Are we to continue screaming at each other like naughty children, madam. Anne is DEAD! I have seen the body with my own eyes! Her last act on this Earth was to attempt to murder Miss Elizabeth Bennet. I know that! Fitzwilliam knows that! Every groom in the stable knows that. Soon everyone in Hunsford will know, and tomorrow, London. Face facts! Your ridiculous insistence that I should marry a sickly, unpleasant, insipid, untalented, unaccomplished girl, who is a first cousin just because you and my mother got yourselves soused on brandy cordial and thought it a good idea once a quarter-century ago; coupled with your incessant insistence despite my repeated and emphatic denials; created a monster. YOU KILLED HER, but, really, she has never even been alive. She has been trapped here in Rosings living a half-life for the last decade at least. The world will not even notice she is gone, nor will it mourn your absence from society."
For once in his life, he thought he might have gotten through to his aunt, or at least shut her up.
He softened. "I do not wish to be harsh, but you never listen unless someone bludgeons you into submission, and you usually go back on your word. Those days are over. Unless Anne was uncharacteristically diligent enough to make a will since her birthday, I believe you are entitled to spend the rest of your days in the dower house, but I very much doubt you will be mistress here a when all is said and done. Once Miss Bennet lives or dies, I shall never step foot within ten miles again, nor will I ever allow you entrance to any property I own."
"You would cast off your own flesh and blood?"
"I will distance myself from a murderer, so yes, if that murderer is my own family, I will cut ties with them without a second thought, and sleep like a baby."
"You are a disgrace to your family. I am ashamed of you!"
He looked at her carefully. If he squinted his eyes just right, he could see a woman trying to get by in a man's world, beset on all sides, hurt by the loss of her precious daughter. Of course, he ruefully admitted, to get his eyes to squint that far would take far more brandy than he had on him. For the most part, Lady Catherine was an unpleasant child, who had never been forced to control her temper, who grew up to be an unpleasant woman and quite the most selfish person he had ever met.
He leaned in menacingly and growled.
"You are mistaken. You are a de Bourgh, though you still like to entertain the obsolete fantasy that you are a Fitzwilliam. I am a Darcy!"
Then he spun on his heel and walked away. He still had a great deal to do. There were letters to write, arrangements to be made, and so forth.
He headed for his room, ruefully admitting that the bath he had dreamed of after watching the foal being born was as far out of reach as the moon.